Nokia says it is bolstering its software portfolio to give a better offer to businesses and communications services companies (CSPs). The company’s new framework will help CSPs develop artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

The Finnish telecoms giant today announced it is bringing all its software applications together under its AVA brand (Automation, Visualisation & Analytics), which currently provides intelligent automation solutions to customers.

Although they have thus far been know as a hardware platform provider for telcos, the Finnish company seems now to be focused on software as a service (SaaS) offerings “in the cloud”.

Strengthening of CSP software portfolio

“We are reinforcing our commitment to provide deep intelligence across our security, automation and monetisation solutions. We look forward to partnering with our CSP and enterprise customers along with application developers to drive further innovation and create 5G value.“, said Hamdy Farid, senior vice president for business applications at Nokia.

Integrating AI to CSP software portfolio

Nokia’s OSS, BSS, and security software offering to be unified under its AVA brand. As part of the latest changes, Nokia is launching a new AVA open analytics framework so that CSPs can accelerate AI projects. This means that data scientists will spend less time organising information, and more time doing what they do best – analysing data.

The framework will enable organisations to create a data lake that can be used to store any type of data, whether structured or unstructured. The framework abstracts technical complexity and enables users to focus on their business requirements rather than the underlying technology.

In addition, the framework provides an abstraction layer that allows users to access any type of data without having to worry about how it was stored or where it came from. By doing so, the framework helps users to discover and use relevant information within their organisation.

Nokia also reports that they have also created what they describe as a ‘digital ecosystem’, named IGNITE, which enables customers and partners to collaborate on projects, and more than 20 projects are reportedly underway with customers and application providers, including “the development of new machine learning models, automation, and security incident detection and response use cases”.

In addition to the big announcements about 5.5G at Win-Win·Huawei Innovation Week, Huawei also launched a new suite of green development solutions. Picking up on the themes at its 2022 Global Analyst Summit, Huawei is seeking to help operators systematically improve network energy efficiency.

At its 2022 Global Analyst Summit, Huawei focused on ‘Innovating nonstop for a greener intelligent world.’ At Win-Win·Huawei Innovation Week, the company went a step further by outlining a set of solutions to help deliver on the promises that it and its operators had made on addressing the global decarbonisation challenge through greater network energy efficiency.

“As ICT infrastructure continues to evolve from 5G and F5G to 5.5G and F5.5G, green networks, evaluated against the network carbon intensity (NCIe) index, will become a critical part of future target networks.

The main objective of our solution launch today is to help operators systematically build green networks that simultaneously address traffic growth and carbon emission reduction,” explained Huawei’s Carrier BG Chief Marketing Officer Philip Song at Win-Win·Huawei Innovation Week

According to Song, technological innovation is required at three levels to help customers achieve green development goals:

• At the site and equipment level, more integrated designs and new materials should be used to move sites fully outdoors, and increase equipment energy efficiency and the efficiency of using renewable energy.
• In cross-site coordination and networking, a simplified network architecture and improved forwarding efficiency are required to maximize energy efficiency and make networks all-optical, simplified, and intelligent.
• To achieve green O&M, new O&M and energy-saving policies should be more easily developed and delivered, and energy efficiency indicators and baselines should be made more visible, manageable, and optimizable.

At the event, Song also announced the launch of Huawei’s green development solution with innovations at these three levels, as well as the new NCIe indicator system which supports this three-layer solution of green site, green network, and green operation.

“Huawei is committed to working with operators to improve the energy efficiency of ICT infrastructure and create value using green ICT technologies,” Song concluded

The full details of Huawei’s new green development solution provided at Win-Win·Huawei Innovation Week were as follows:

At the site layer, the solution focuses on innovation in three areas:

• Fully-outdoor deployment: Using innovative materials, the industry-leading blade power module supports 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G within a single site. The leading One Blade One Site solution features 97% site energy efficiency (SEE).
• High degrees of integration: Ultra-wideband RF modules and multi-band antennas are integrated within these simplified sites. The company’s unique signal direct injection feeding (SDIF) technology is able to realize zero losses with zero cabling inside multi-band antennas, boosting the telecommunications energy efficiency (TEE) of the equipment.
• Efficient use of renewable energy: Solutions such as Huawei’s AI-based PV-storage optimization and iPV shading for loss reduction are used to maximize the efficiency of using renewable energy.

At the network layer, the solution also features innovations in three areas:

• All-optical connectivity: By upgrading the entire network from electrical switching to optical switching, the solution improves energy efficiency by about 10 times, while swapping copper for fiber further improves energy efficiency by about five times.
• Simplification: The multi-service processing capability of Huawei routers enables the solution to integrate four units of equipment into one. With SDH modernization, the solution replaces multiple cabinets per site with one sub-rack per site, significantly reducing the amount of equipment room space needed and improving network energy efficiency (NEE). Continuous innovation in the optical transmission network (OTN) has also enabled the ultra-wideband Super C120+L120 solution to support a per-fiber capacity of nearly 100 Tbit/s, which means 1 million users can simultaneously watch movies online over a single fiber the thickness of a hair.
• Intelligence: The solution supports intelligent dynamic hibernation of routers and automatically adjusts the forwarding frequency of network processors based on changes in the traffic volume.

At the operation layer, the solution focuses on user operations, energy saving policies, and energy efficiency indicators:

• The solution accelerates the migration of users to networks using more energy-efficient RATs, for example, from 2G and 3G to 4G and 5G, greatly reducing energy consumption per bit and reducing the NCIe value.
• The solution implements real-time traffic control and analysis, and adjusts forwarding processors’ frequency or shuts down ports based on traffic volume changes.
• The solution ensures that the indicators are visible, manageable, and optimizable.

At Huawei’s recent Global Analyst Summit 2022, chairman Ken Hu Keynote focused on ‘Innovating nonstop for a greener intelligent world,’ as Bill Mew reports.

Huawei has been innovating nonstop for over 30 years to create value for its customers and for society as a whole. As chairman Hu explained: “Innovation has become a core part of Huawei’s DNA. Despite considerable operational challenges over the past few years, we have continued to steadily increase our investment in R&D. For nearly a decade, our strategy has been to re-invest at least 10% of our annual revenue back into R&D. Last year, we invested 22%.”

During the event a series of Huawei executives outlined the company’s initiatives to address various industry challenges, such as bottlenecks like Shannon’s limit and von Neumann architecture which require us to explore new theories and architectures. It also focused on the company’s own priorities, including access certain advanced components, the shift in focus to systems engineering, the war for talent and the R&D drive to achieve breakthroughs in three areas: fundamental theories, software, and architecture.

In particular though Hu focused on how digital technology can enable low-carbon development, and what Huawei is doing to optimize energy supply and consumption in order to help the world go green.

Energy Supply

On the energy supply side, Huawei are working to improve the share of renewable energy in the overall energy mix. To make this happen, they are seeking to redefine PhotoVoltaic (PV) with digital technology to improve energy yields and O&M efficiency.

It is already made great progress. In 2014, Huawei became the first company to apply the concept of distributed base stations to the PV industry, which has helped solar farms increase their energy yields. It then introduced power line carrier technologies to the PV field, which can reduce deployment costs, and they are also using cloud and AI to cut O&M costs too.

For example, in Qinghai, China, it has helped build the world’s largest single-site solar power station with an installed capacity of 2.2 GW. With cloud and AI, we have increased its energy yield by more than 2% and enhanced O&M efficiency by over 50%.

Energy Consumption

On the energy consumption side, it is doing everything that it can to help industries reduce their own carbon footprints with digital technology. For example, in its own industry, it is working to reduce the environmental impact of networks. Huawei’s main focus is on mobile sites and data centers, which are the most power-hungry network components. Currently, there are about 10 million mobile sites worldwide. If Huawei can make these sites more energy efficient, it would mean a lot for the ICT industry. It is using simplified architecture design, a greater proportion of renewable energy, and AI to optimize systemlevel energy efficiency. For example, it is using simplified architecture design in Indonesia.

Huawei has replaced indoor sites with integrated outdoor cabinets, so that equipment rooms and air conditioners are no longer needed. This has cut the energy consumption of support infrastructure by about 30%. In Poland, Huawei is equipping sites with solar panels, which can now provide up to 30% of the power needed for a single site.

As data centres may be becoming ever more critical parts of our infrastructure, but they are extremely energy-intensive. To address this, Huawei has made great improvements in power consumption through new innovations in liquid cooling, AI, modular construction, and cluster computing. It has applied all of these technologies to its green data centre in Guian, and has significantly reduced its carbon footprint.

At the same time, with digitalisation and decarbonisation also presenting enormous opportunities, Huawei is seeking to capitalise on this as well. Applying its R&D and working closely with its partners and peers, it hopes to build a better and greener intelligent world.

For more information get a copy of Huawei’s Green Development 2030 Report here:

https://www.huawei.com/en/giv/green-development-2030